Google Is Laying Picasa In The Grave, Moving Over To Google Photos

Hope you like Google Photos. Starting May 1, Google is going to start phasing out Picasa from its product lineup entirely. Fortunately, you still have some time.
If you have any photos stored in Picasa Web Albums, you can access most of them via Google Photos already right now. If you want to continue adding to and editing those albums, you'll have to use Google Photos to do it in the future.

If you don't like Google Photos, Google is going to release a tool that will allow you to view your Picasa Web Albums data. This won't allow you to make any changes or add new albums, but all the data will be available for viewing or export.

The desktop Picasa application will no longer be supported, nor available for download (at least from Google) after March 15. If you already have it on your computer, it will still work like normal, but it won't receive any more updates. Google suggests using the Google Photos desktop uploader instead, and managing photos from the web.

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Comments

The piece missing from their "Google Photos takes over" story is management of local libraries.

So you either move your library to the cloud (and pay Google for the space), or cut ties with Google web albums by moving to another desktop image manager. I'm not yet ready to upload 500GB or so of photos to the cloud while their web-based product is clearly inferior to desktop Picasa in terms of management and speed.

Picasa is also a good tool for managing images across local servers. I haven't seen a comparable desktop product do that, and Google Photos doesn't handle that at all.

I nearly have over 500GB organised with Picasa from as far back as 2000 scared to move these to the cloud especially with the way Google seem to be changing their support for tools & services willy nilly. Any suggestions where we should move for good desktop photo management Lifehacker?

I had all my picasa photos loaded up to there google plus page for the past few years. When google photos came out, I followed there advise and installed the desktop up-loader.
However I now have a problem where I have duplicates of a lot of photos, some are exactly the same name, date, size, but they both appear. It ended up using all of my extra google drive capacity. (I eventually converted to "high Quality"/ I hope when they move over to google photos, they fix up the duplicate issue.